This demonstrates one of the absurdities (Dick Lindzen’s term, as I recall) in the way current climate change theory works: For a given observed temperature change, the smaller the forcing that caused it, the greater the inferred sensitivity of the climate system.

But taken to its logical conclusion, this relationship between the strength of the forcing, and the inferred sensitivity of the climate system, leads to the absurd notion that an infinitesimally small forcing causes nearly infinite climate sensitivity(!) As I have mentioned before, this is analogous to an ancient tribe of people thinking their moral shortcomings were responsible for lightning, storms, and other whims of nature.

This absurdity is avoided if we simply admit that we do not know all of the natural forcings involved in climate change. And the greater the number of natural forcings involved, then the less we have to worry about human-caused global warming.

The IPCC, though, never points out this inherent source of bias in its reports. But the IPCC can not admit to scientific uncertainty…that would reduce the change of getting the energy policy changes they so desire.

Spencer shows the scientific/mathematical modeling absurdity of attributing temperature variations to one single factor (CO2 concentration) in the presence of natural variations not accounted for in the model. The more absurd, the more alarming. Or the other way around, the more alarming, the more absurd.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

How independent are the other two international data sets?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made a statement expressing full support of IPCC prior to Cliamategate. This statement forms the scientific basis of the climate politics of the Swedish government. The pressure on the Royal Academy to revise its statement is now reaching boiling point and a release of pressure is necessary. Silence and do-nothing is no longer an option. Even Swedish Public Radio is now reporting about the fall of IPCC.

Like any other field, research on climate change has some fundamental gaps, although not the ones typically claimed by sceptics.

A fuller reading of the e-mails from CRU in Norwich, UK, does show a sobering amount of rude behaviour and verbal faux pas, but nothing that challenges the scientific consensus of climate change.

But this climate of suspicion we're working in is insane. It's really drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science when some people cry 'fraud' and 'misconduct' for the slightest reasons. (Gavin Schmidt)

The sad truth of climate science is that the most crucial information is the least reliable.

Climate scientists think that a main weakness of their models is their limited ability to simulate vertical air movement, such as convection in the tropics that lifts humid air into the atmosphere.

IPCC's key statement — that most of the warming since the mid-twentieth century is "very likely" to be due to human-caused increases in greenhouse-gas concentration — remains solid because it rests on multiple lines of evidence from different teams examining many aspects of the climate system, says Susan Solomon, the former co-chair of the IPCC team that produced the 2007 physical science report and a climate researcher with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado.

The IPCC's team of scientists, Solomon says, would not have said that warming is unequivocalbased on a single line of evidence — even if came from Moses himself.

Nature thus seeks to give its readers the impression that Climategate has not happened: IPCC business as usual! Convincing? No.

The interesting information is that the main weakness of current climate simulation models is their limited ability to account for vertical air motion. We have pointed out that this is an unnecessary limitation, which can be removed by solving the full 3d Navier-Stokes equations, instead of some reduced version with vertical averaging, a possibility which we are now exploring, and which will be included in the next generation of climate models...

Maybe such new climate models will be able to offer us some meaningful information...

The Analysis of Climategate by John Costello gives a clear view of a dark moment of science with scientific malpractice. It should be read and contemplated by many, including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Analysis compares science to justice: You cannot prove that you are innocent if accused of something, but a trial concerns the different question if it can be proved that you are guilty. Similarly, in science it is impossible to prove that a synthetic statement about nature is correct, but it may be possible to prove that it is incorrect. Incorrectness is what Climategate is about.

Climate sensitivity measures the change in global temperature under changes of heat forcing,

and can only be assessed using climate models, because controled experiments are impossible.

I have in previous posts questioned if the simple ode-model used by Lindzen-Choi is capable of giving information on feed-back, positive or negative, underlying climate sensitivity, as illustrated by Spencer. However, it may be possible that full 3d pde-models capturing the turbulent transport of heat in atmosphere and ocean, can serve this purpose...

To those who come to “Climate Change” with open eyes (not to mention open minds), it merely constitutes a trend - as unmistakeable as tracks in the snow, the cupidity and mendacity of politicians, the poltroonery of establishment scientists and their journalistic lapdogs or the catastrophist phantasmagoria of anthropogenic global warming pseudo-environmentalists.

Furthermore, the perception is strengthened to the point of absolute confirmation by the predictions of dissenting mavericks. These renegades, unashamed in the face of understandable vexation and vilification from practitioners of orthodox purity, obdurately persist in pursuing rigorous, replicable science. This, naturally, is an outrage, which one would not hesitate to condemn save for one small but inconvenient circumstance. They make a furtive and disreputable virtue of repeatedly being right!

Then - to use the inevitable cliché - we have Climategate. And, dare it be said, for those such as yourself, in the vanguard of so called “faith communities”, who arrogate to themselves the role of moral leadership, this gives rise to serious questions, does it not?

Indeed, in many ways, "Climategate" is less about the "science" - which anyway is garbage - than it is about the integrity of the scientific process, an issue of immensely greater ethical significance for all who value truth as well as democratic accountability. AGW science has been exposed as a fraud, by far the gravest in the entire history of science.

The AGW hypothesis itself is no better than a glib and distorted misrepresentation of a 100 year old speculation relating to the so-called Greenhouse Effect allied to invented evidence concocted within the guts of a computer by individuals with a predetermined agenda coupled with huge personal vested interests - financial and otherwise.

We now know unequivocally that not just the notorious Mann, Bradley Hughes hockey stick, beloved of AGW propagandists, is a worthless contrivance, but even the very temperature record itself is largely a fiction - maybe entirely.

If the Royal Swedish Academy read the letter, what would the response be? That Wyndham's analysis is obviously nonsense, even if eloquently expressed, and that the Royal Swedish Academy has no reason whatsoever to revise its statement of full support of the science and standards of IPCC and its Hockey Team? That Climategate did not happen?

The global-warming establishment’s futile attempt to resist pressure from an opposing, grassroots collective caused a shift to occur – displaying a process known in certain scientific circles as self-organization. The new order that has emerged has placed a new definition on the label peer — that of an amorphous group of intelligent online observers, detached from the outcome, with an extremely solid grasp on the topic at hand.

In a case where politics comes into play, it appears that this review process is much more rigorous – it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties. This is the point that one must take from Climategate.

We no longer live in an age where a system can be entirely controlled. Information lacks the protective coat that it once had – bureaucracies can be infiltrated and cracked, and access to broadcast tools are pervasive. When a system is no longer operating correctly, pressures mount, causing an inevitable instability.

And when the hands of Big Government play a part in molding the consensus, or in this case Big Global Government, the peer-to-peer review network and the undermedia will play the unavoidable role of getting to the truth – a truth desperately needed when crafting policy that will affect every living human and their offspring.

The Times’ Thomas Friedman recently stated, “The internet is an open sore of untreated, unfiltered information.” There is much truth in his statement. But when taken in context, it is spoken like a true gatekeeper. The quotecame in response to how the undermedia exposed controversial information on former green jobs czar Van Jones. Climategate was indeed an open sore – but it could only be seen on the internet, through the window of a tiny blog called the Air Vent, and treated by Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, and others through a new process called peer-to-peer review.

So take heed gatekeepers. The Undermedia has arrived. Peer-to-peer review has matured. Either operate effectively, or be self-organized out of existence.

My article with Johan Hoffman The Mathematical Secret of Flight has now been delivered for publication in Nordisk Matematisk Tidskrift.We present the first correct mathematical/physical explanation of how a wing is capable of generating a lift/drag quotient of size 10-20, which enables birds and aeroplanes to fly.

The secret of flight is revealed in the above figure. Can you see it?

We show that existing explanations are either incorrect, such as Kutta-Zhukovsky's circulation theory, or trivial, such as lower pressure above the wing than below.

based on identifying the instability mechanism of potential flow changing the zero-lift pressure distribution of potential flow to turbulent lifting flow with some drag. We show that both lift and drag can accurately be predicted by computing, on a laptop, turbulent solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations with a slip boundary condition modeling the small skin friction of slightly viscous flow.

lördag 9 januari 2010

A number of recent papers analyzing the nature of climate models have yielded a stunning result little known outside of mathematical circles—climate models like the ones relied on by the IPCC contain irreducible imprecision.

According to one researcher, all interesting solutions for atmospheric and oceanic simulation (AOS) models are chaotic, hence almost certainly structurally unstable.

Further more, this instability is an intrinsic mathematical property of the models which can not be eliminated.

Analysis suggests that models should only be used to study processes and phenomena, not for precise comparisons with nature.

The ability to predict the future state of the Earth climate system, given its present state and the forcings acting upon it, is the holly grail of climate science.

What is not fully appreciated by most is that, in the prediction of the evolution of that system, we are severely limited by the fact that we do not know with arbitrary accuracy the evolution equations and the initial conditions of the system.

By necessity climate models work with a finite number of equations, from initial data determined with finite resolution from a finite set of observations.

These limitations are further exacerbated by the addition of structural instability due to finite mesh discretization errors (the real world isn't divided into boxes 10s or 100s of kilometers on a side; the impact of changing mesh size has been well documented in a number of recent studies).

A pessimistic view based on the argument that since the global weather is a chaotic system, it is impossible to predict because of an irreducible imprecision of computational modeling.

But is this a valid argument? Not necessarily, as I discuss in previous posts listed in Mathematics of Global Warming: Weather and climate dynamics results from turbulent motion of air and water and even if turbulent flow is chaotic or unpredictable in a pointwise sense, certain mean-values are computationally predictable. The conclusion of irreducible imprecision thus may be valid for pointwise quantities, but not necessarily for mean-values of interest in climate prediction, of course depending on what imprecision for what mean-value carries meaningful information. Imprecision of 50% may useless, 10% may say something, while 1% may be best possible and carry definite information.

Our experience from computational simulation of turbulent flow indicates that mean-values such as drag and lift of bluff bodies may be computable up to an irreducible imprecision of 1%.

We do not have to give up the hope of and work towards meaningful computational climate simulation and prediction. The irreducible imprecisionbecause of chaos of turbulence may be acceptable. But to reach this limit requires advancing the computational technology of climate simulation, and here adaptive finite element methods with a posteriori error estimation offers new tools for progress...

Since SVT has followed in the climate alarmism foot-steps of BBC, when will SVT launch its own review? And when will the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences launch a review of its own climate alarmism? The Swedish people is waiting...

lördag 2 januari 2010

The climate of the Earth is profoundly affected by two competing processes: the greenhouse effect, which acts to warm the lower atmosphere and cool the upper atmosphere, and atmospheric convection (thermals, clouds, precipitation) which does just the opposite: cools the lower atmosphere and warms the upper atmosphere.

While we usually only discuss the greenhouse effect in the context of global warming (that is, the theory that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will lead to higher temperatures in the lower atmosphere), it turns out that the greenhouse effect has a more fundamental role: there would be no weather on Earth without the greenhouse effect.

As Dick Lindzen alluded to back in 1990, while everyone seems to understand that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth’s surface, few people are aware of the fact that weather processes greatly limit that warming. And one very real possibility is that the 1 deg. C direct warming effect of doubling our atmospheric CO2 concentration by late in this century will be mitigated by the cooling effects of weather to a value closer to 0.5 deg. C or so (about 1 deg. F.) This is much less than is being predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or by NASA’s James Hansen, who believe that weather changes will amplify, rather than reduce, that warming.

To model climate we need to model weather and to model weather we need to solve the full 3d Navier-Stokes equations including the crucial vertical turbulent motion and heat exchange.

Current computational models us a simplified form of the Navier-Stokes equations where the

The Examiners interview with Fred Singer gives a summary of the present state of climate science. The interview ends with the following question and answer: You've devoted a lot of time and energy to this debate. Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Singer:

I am really quite optimistic. I am sure that sound science must -- and will -- win out in the long run and convince not only scientists but also the public and politicians that climate change is almost all natural, and that a modest warming, should it occur, is good for humanity overall.

The revelations of “ClimateGate” will be very helpful here and show how a gang of determined climatologists was able to con almost everyone by cooking the data and stifling any scientific criticism from 'skeptics.'Of course, 'long run' may mean many more years -- during which the alarmists will try to impose policies that produce great economic hardships for no good reason.

I fear especially those who have learned to game the system and are using global warming scares to enrich themselves at our expense. I won't mention names but you know who they are:

Utopians who believe that global governance will lead to a better world;

Luddites who oppose technological advance and economic growth;

international bureaucrats and profiteers who want power and money.

If they ever gain the upper hand, the world may have a difficult time recovering.

I hope I can be around when we can look back on past decades and say: "How could this climate insanity have fooled so many smart people?"

Other scientific organizations including the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) saw rifts grow in their membership. It became clear as the year progressed that the so-called scientific ‘consensus’ was anything but.